The coolie speaks is a detailed and fresh history of Cuba's use of Chinese indentured servants in the years 1847–1878. Historians often assume that Chinese labourers helped ease Cuba's transition from slavery to free labour and seldom explore what such workers had to say about their own experiences. Yun disrupts both historiographical tendencies by detailing the contemporaneous use of slave and indentured labour and uncovering the words of Chinese workers themselves. Her literary and historical analysis of Chinese-language testimonies submitted to an 1874 Chinese Commission on indentured labour in Cuba challenges basic assumptions about freedom, modernity, and progress while exploring the actual conditions under which Chinese labourers lived and worked. The coolies' words, she argues, expose a paradox at the heart of such Cuban–Chinese labour contracts: ostensibly a guarantor of freedom and a symbol of enlightened labour relations, the contract was actually a tool deployed to entrap and enslave the coolie.
Yun's historical overview points out that, far from replacing African slaves, as is commonly assumed, Chinese labourers arrived during a period of rising slave imports; coolies and Afro-Cubans often worked together in what she calls a ‘hybrid slave system’ (p. 30). The book's core chapters explore the written petitions and oral depositions submitted to the commission. Yun views the coolie petitions as ‘protest literature’ (p. 80), radically critiquing colonial labour relations and, moreover, liberal philosophies of contract as consensual, limited in duration, and agreed upon by similarly empowered parties. Chinese labourers from diverse social backgrounds, including highly educated professionals, described being kidnapped or falsely deceived aboard coolie ships and sent to Cuba where they were legally bought and sold by employers who withheld pay. Coolies detailed an immense struggle against an overwhelmingly oppressive system that ensured their indefinite service through mandatory recontract laws and a ‘paper chase’ (p. 112) requiring workers to purchase permits for everything from walking in the street to freedom itself.
While deploying a vocabulary of slavery to describe indentured servitude may confuse conceptually distinct categories, Yun's evidence of coolies' virtual enslavement is compelling. Lengthy quotations (as well as an appendix of additional petitions) allow diverse Chinese voices to speak for themselves and give readers an intimate sense of the anguish experienced by labourers cut off from home, unable to care for their families, locked in a system which promised eventual freedom but made that freedom virtually unobtainable, and destined to die in a form of bondage that killed half of its workers within eight years of service.
Against such oppression, labourers resisted by taking sick, fleeing, assassinating brutal overseers, and committing suicide, at times collectively, giving Cuba the world's highest suicide rate. Providing testimony to the 1874 Chinese commission was itself a dangerous and a defiant act of resistance, which employers violently sought to prevent and against which they retaliated brutally, making the existence of nearly 3,000 submissions to the commission all the more remarkable. To an extent, the labourers' efforts succeeded, as China outlawed the coolie trade in 1878 upon completion of the commission's report.
The book's final section analyses Afro-Chinese writer Antonio Chuffat Latour's 1927 history of the Cuban-Chinese. Where the coolie testimonies divulge a reality of black–Chinese interracial conflict, Latour's multifaceted text suppresses such conflicts and highlights the similar circumstances experienced by slaves and coolies, their shared resistance against enslavement, and their common sacrifice in the Cuban Wars of Independence. The ‘coolie narrative’ (p. 231) of Chinese labour as both subjugated and resistant was eclipsed, however, in the early twentieth century as new Chinese merchants arrived and depicted themselves as apolitical, model immigrants focused solely on beneficial trade.
The coolie speaks is an innovative addition to histories of slavery and freedom in the Americas. Yun places both Asian labourers and Cuba squarely into a growing body of scholarship, typically focused on North America and the British Caribbean, interrogating the reality behind ideals of individual freedom and consensual labour relations. Her interdisciplinary approach combines history, law, philosophy, and literary theory and draws upon impressively broad swaths of material to contextualize her analysis. The discussion might have benefited, however, from further treatment of the Spanish legal context, especially with regard to slavery. It was the Spanish system that coolies had to navigate and one wonders if self-purchase (coartación) and other slave regulations formed a precedent for indenture laws. Nevertheless, by exposing contract labourers' disposability and confinement in a state of perpetual bondage, Yun successfully complicates ‘transition narratives’ that regard Asian labourers as intermediaries between slave and free, pre-modern and modern modes of production, and even black and white racial categories.
